Retail investors are more likely to hold bullish bets on bitcoin, while big players tend to be short

Small investors are betting that bitcoin’s price will rise, while hedge funds and other large traders are betting it will fall.

That is the pattern rapidly emerging after four weeks of trading in the first U.S. bitcoin futures market, launched last month by Cboe Global Markets Inc. Futures are a type of contract that enables traders to wager whether the future price of an underlying asset will rise or fall.